The Queensland energy minister, Mick de Brenni, says there is no imminent risk of blackouts linked to the latest serious breakdown of the Callide coal-fired power station.
The four units at one of Queensland’s largest generators, the failure-prone Callide power station near Biloela, were all offline after a series of incidents last week.
At a press conference on Sunday, de Brenni addressed concerns about power supply shortages, which had been raised by the Mining and Energy Union (MEU) and others. Those worries were compounded by partial shutdowns and maintenance works at other Queensland generators.
The minister said the transmission system operator, Powerlink, had advised that the state had more than twice the amount of electricity supply needed to meet current demand.
“We have a strong publicly owned and resilient system,” he said. “We’re very confident moving forward that we’ll have adequate supply. There’s no need for an emergency response.”
The shutdown of Callide has reignited debate about the immediate future of coal-fired power stations.
Some, like the Institute of Public Affairs, said that “likely blackouts and load-shedding” had “exposed the consequences” of removing coal-fired power stations from the national energy market.
The Queensland Conservation Council said coal was increasingly unreliable and that renewables supported the energy system when coal power stations were offline. The council said the latest problem at Callide was evidence of the need to close coal stations and hasten the shift to renewables.
Callide has been running at reduced capacity since an explosion and fire last year caused major damage to one of its four generators.
That generator was one of two at “Callide C” built in 2001 and is one of the country’s youngest coal-fired generators. In 2020, Callide C broke down eight times.
On Sunday, de Brenni said Callide was “old fashioned” and that “you wouldn’t build infrastructure like this going forward”.
“That’s why we’re investing in new renewables, wind and solar,” he said. “The energy system of the future is not about old-fashioned, hard-to-maintain equipment, it’s about new technology.”
The state government’s long-term energy plan, announced earlier this year, envisages transforming coal-fired power station sites like Callide into renewables hubs from about 2027. It also offered a jobs guarantee for energy-sector workers affected by the transition.
Clare Silcock, an energy strategist with the Queensland Conservation Council, said the energy grid’s reliance on coal-fired power would create problems if power stations were offline during periods of peak demand.
“It puts us in a pretty intense position for this summer, because we don’t have the investment in renewables and storage in place yet,” she said.
“We could have more than 1o summers like this, where unreliable coal-fired power stations are offline. The only way to get out of the situation is to transition to renewables”.
The MEU Queensland vice-president, Mike Brunker, released a statement last week saying the breakdown at Callide confirmed workers’ “fears that that investment in maintenance of the power station has been neglected in the race to shut down coal power and move to renewables”.
“We need the Queensland government to step in and ensure Callide is being responsibly managed and maintenance and repair is prioritised – not only to get the power station back up and running but to keep it operating safely in the years ahead.
“The focus should be on investing in the existing fleet and exploring opportunities to improve them rather than running them down.”
De Brenni said the government supported the state’s power generation workforce and that he was confident engineers would have Callide operating safely “as soon as possible”.
“[They have] done a stellar job of maintaining that plant and they’ll continue to do that,” he said. “We take our responsibility to manage our energy assets fully.”
Callide is run by Queensland government-owned CS Energy. Its chief executive, Andrew Bills, has said the “immediate focus is to work methodically and safely to restore these units to service as quickly as possible”.
